Sermon: The Worst Temptation

First Presbyterian Church

February 22, 2026, Lent 1A

Matthew 4:1-11

 

The Worst Temptation

 

 

When was the last time anyone dared you to go up on top of the tallest building in town and throw yourself off to prove that God loves you so much – that you are #blessed, so to speak – that God wouldn’t possibly let you get hurt?

Has anyone ever challenged you to turn a bunch of decorative garden stones at Home Depot or Lowe’s into bread to feed all the people at a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen?  

Or have you ever been tempted to sell your soul to some billionaire in order to get bankrolled for a run at public office – maybe even the highest office in the land?

As familiar as this story is – we do read it once a year from either Matthew, Mark, or Luke – one of the things we often don’t think about is that the particular temptations Jesus faces here are not really that relatable for most of us, even in more modern equivalents. And truth be told, it’s just as well. We struggle enough with the far more mundane temptations with which we are confronted on a regular basis. 

I could go through a whole laundry list of temptations any one of us might face on a regular basis. A typical preacher might toss out some manner of temptation to some financial misdeed, possibly, or a more sexual temptation, perhaps, or the temptation to make like the Houston Astros and cheat our way to whatever success or “win” we desire. 

I wonder, though, if the most insidious temptation we face on a regular basis – so common, in fact, that we probably don’t even recognize it as a temptation – is what might be called the temptation to ‘let it slide.’ It’s the temptation that comes of seeing a thing that is wrong, and knowing that it is wrong, but choosing to ‘let it slide.’

This temptation works a lot of ways. Let’s take what we might call a global example. The world’s economic food system is in many ways riddled with all manner of corruption, abusive or exploitative practices towards workers in the supply down to and including slavery, widely unethical pay practices, environmentally degrading agricultural practices, and a whole load of other such wrongdoing. The practices in question implicate an awful lot of the favorite food brands people, particularly in the USA, buy most often. Now there are in some cases particular brands or companies that take into account and seek to avoid or eliminate such practices; you might see labels such as “fair trade certified” or “rainforest-safe” or something like that on the packaging of such foods or goods. Still, you know, those brands tend to be a bit more expensive and harder to find. And, you know, you really like that particular chocolate bar or can’t function at all without that particular cup of coffee in the morning (just to name two of the worst examples). And then comes the defeatist argument: what difference can one person make, anyway?

And so, we … let it slide.

But let’s get more immediate, or more personal. You know something is wrong with the couple next door. You don’t see him, unless he comes tearing in late at night, often with a lot of noisy shouting or arguing. She’s turning much more withdrawn, less approachable, and when you see her she’s clearly trying to hide something and is clearly more fearful and on edge. You have suspicions. But you don’t know anything. And you can already hear the voices telling you to ‘mind your own business.’ And after all, if he’s willing to be that violent to her, who’s to say he won’t be that violent towards you?

And so, we…let it slide.

All creation suffers, peoples around the world are ground into dust by unrelenting poverty, women are abused constantly and even killed, and we…let it slide.

Perhaps this is where Jesus’s temptation meets ours after all. The Tempter’s challenges to Jesus are a direct attack on Jesus’s relationship to God the Father. Who does Jesus serve with his power for miracles? Does Jesus glorify God, or himself? Who is worthy of worship? Jesus lets none of these challenges slide, to say the least. And yes, that temptation to "let it slide" resonates with those questions as well. Do we serve God instead of a flashy doer of tricks? Do we glorify God instead of putting God to the test? Do we worship God instead of a power-mad tyrant?

And also, Jesus doesn’t get into great theological arguments with the Tempter either. Each temptation is swatted aside, you’ll note, with a statement that either begins with or includes the phrase “It is written…” In this case, all three of these answers are written in the book of Deuteronomy, that great recapitulation of the Law that finishes the Torah. 

We do have that resource at hand, you know. We also have a lot more “it is written” resources as well, law and prophets and writings and psalms and poetry and letters and apocalyptic visions and most of all the very acts and deeds of Jesus himself, written that we might have Jesus’s witness in our minds, our hearts, and our lives, that we might know temptation when we see it and might be prepared to rebuff it at every turn. As it is written in John 20:31, “these are written so that you might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

See, not giving into temptation isn’t about the do’s and don’ts, the “gotcha"s and the finger-pointers. It’s about life; life in Jesus’s name, life in God’s good-created world, life in the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It’s about the choice, again and again, to live into our baptisms and our confirmation promises and the commitment we express every time we come to this table. It’s about life in the Jesus who chooses again and again to live for God and for us. 

For all this, we have to say Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #165, The Glory of These Forty Days; #---, A serpent so wily; #819, Be Still, My Soul

 

 

  

Sermon: Famished

First Presbyterian Church

March 9, 2025, Lent 1C

Luke 4:1-13

 

Famished

 

Every year in the lectionary cycle, as the season of Lent commences, the first Sunday of Lent features as its gospel reading an account of the temptation of Jesus. Conveniently, all three of the synoptic gospels include such an account (though the gospel of John does not), but the three accounts given can differ in remarkable ways.

Mark’s gospel, generally agreed to be the first to be written, barely does more than mention the temptation; Jesus is in the desert for forty days, being tempted, Jesus was “with the wild beasts,” and angels ministered to him. That’s about it. Matthew’s account is more detailed, like Luke’s, but reverses the order of the second and third temptations that Luke includes. (One could almost make a sermon of that difference, but not today. Maybe another year.) Matthew also includes the angels ministering to Jesus in the wake of the temptation, which Luke does not.

One thing Luke and Matthew agree upon, though, is Jesus’s condition after forty days of this fasting and temptation. Both of the gospels make sure we understand that Jesus had eaten nothing for forty days by that time, and both use the word that we get translated here in the NRSV as “famished.”

“Famished” is a pretty visceral word. It’s one thing to say simply that you’re hungry, no matter how much emphasis you put on it – “I’m so hungry” is probably something like you have heard from your children at some point or another. “Starving” is strong, but also carries a separate, more clinical meaning – how many times were you chastised for not cleaning your plate because of those starving children in Africa? – that in some ways detracts from its immediate forcefulness.

For Luke (and Matthew too) to say that Jesus was “famished” feels different. Luke has already shown something of a flair for drama so far, and this certainly has a definite emotional and dramatic force. It cuts through the “duh” factor – well, of course Jesus is hungry, he hasn’t eaten for forty days – and brings home the raw sensation of the moment, the weakness and vulnerability inherent in a human being in Jesus’s condition at that particular moment. It also reminds us of that which we sometimes need to recall; that Jesus, Son of God that he was even walking about on earth, was also fully human, and in this moment painfully human. 

So, not a surprise that the tempter first appeals to that famished-ness, is it? Turn these stones to bread and eat up. And if you think about it, there were an awful lot of hungry people – maybe even famished – who could be fed by such a maneuver, and plenty of stones just waiting to be turned to bread. 

But Jesus turns away that temptation, as he does with the temptation to claim all worldly power (even though the tempter was not the one to hand out such power, no matter what he might have claimed) and to demonstrate divine protection (in which Jesus answers the tempter’s quotation of a psalm with his third straight citation from Deuteronomy). Absent those ministering angels in Matthew, Jesus’s temptation ends as the tempter departs until an “opportune time,” which will turn out to be three years later, when a malcontent disciple named Judas provides the means to bring Jesus down. At least that's what the tempter thought.

Still, though, we have to marvel at how Jesus swatted aside those temptations like a tall basketball star rejecting shots around the goal. And in his famished condition, it can be even harder for us to comprehend. I know I can’t think straight when I’m even moderately hungry, and I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never truly been famished in my lifetime. 

How does he do it?

Well, there is one other aspect of Luke’s account of the temptation that is different from Matthew’s and Mark’s stories. Both Matthew and Mark describe Jesus as being led out to the wilderness for this experience by the Holy Spirit. That can be hard for us to stomach, the idea that it was the Spirit that put Jesus in this position. After all, doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer specifically ask God not to lead us into temptation? Of course, one might argue that this experience is why Jesus teaches the disciples to ask for this, but that’s a topic for another sermon. Here, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus out into the wilderness. (Mark puts it even more harshly in his brief account, saying in 1:12 that the Spirit “immediately drove him out into the wilderness” when he was barely dry from his baptism.) 

You can talk about things like how this experience clarifies exactly what Jesus’s mission is on earth, or what his relationship to God is, or any number of things like that, but this idea of the Spirit leading Jesus into temptation isn’t ever going to sit easily with us. But there is one more element of Luke’s temptation account that is unique to him that we haven’t spoken of yet. 

Notice how this passage begins: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” 

The Spirit doesn’t lead Jesus into the wilderness unarmed or undefended. Jesus faced the tempter full of the Holy Spirit, and that’s a mismatch every time. No matter how famished he might have been, Jesus was full of what mattered; physical hunger was no match for spiritual fullness. 

Here’s the thing, though: the same thing is true for us, when we face temptation - at least if we would simply accept it. After the famous part of John 14, the part about “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus tells his disciples this: (14:16-17)

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

 

We are not left alone and defenseless. That Advocate, that Holy Spirit that filled Jesus out in that wilderness is with us and would fill us in that same way in whatever time of temptation or testing we might ever face. 

What is it with us, that we don’t remember this? Do we really think that our Lord abandons us in these times of trial? We are, if we will accept it, as armed as Jesus was facing this temptation. Let the Spirit do her work. Let the Spirit fill us. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #165, The Glory of These Forty Days; #215, What Wondrous Love is This; #167, Forty Days and Forty Nights